Focus of Attention

This section talks about the presentation layer.

Presentation Layer

The presentation tier (presentation logic and client tiers) produces what users see and interact with via the browser in a web application.

But it takes more than just hyperlinking things — the “stickiness” and usability of a website can make or break a business.

A high-quality website has:

• – A visually appealing layout.
• – An intuitive navigation structure.

It’s beyond the scope of this course to consider web site design and navigation structure in detail.

• – Designing layouts from scratch requires some graphic design skills.
• – There are some fundamental design principles you can learn.
• – Next we’ll talk about a few basic notions.

Layout

Clear and tidy

Wireframing

Structure and Navigation

Presentation Tier

The complexity of what is happening on the client side in web applications has increased significantly over the years — e.g., cookies, client-side validations, client-side JavaScript associated with HTML elements in the webpage.

Even if you aren’t involved in the actual design of the web pages, it’s important to have knowledge of the design patterns and principles that underly certain client-side technologies.

In the following lectures in this module we’ll present some of these design principles, along with:

• – HTML – the language that is used for specifying web pages.
• – CSS – the language used for styling web pages.
• – JavaScript – the language used for adding behavior to web pages.